Why’s everybody going to Japan?

A Japanese listener gets so many houseguests she starts a spreadsheet to try to figure out what's going on. Why has American tourism to Japan gotten so out of control? The story of a government plot. Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U. S. https://www.amazon.com/dp/140398476X?lv=shuf&language=he&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback by Roland Kelts Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XKVBT1D?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback by W. David Marx Become a premium subscriber! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:27Speaker 00

  Can you just introduce yourself?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yes, my name is Lisa. I am living in Tokyo. I grew up in Tokyo, I was born here, but I sound like this because I went to school in the States as well. I spent about four years in Philly and five or six years in Seattle.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Got it. And so you wrote in with a question which I really enjoyed. Can you tell me what your question is and how you came to it?

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Yes, my question was, why is every single person I know going to Japan or talking about going to Japan? And this question drives me crazy. I think that I tried to sound overly chill when I asked you this question, but actually it's not chill at all, you know, PJ? And I think to give you the full context, is it okay if I share you my screen? I have an Excel sheet that I want to show you.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  So the reason why it's not chill at all is this is a-

• 3:23Speaker 00

  What is this spreadsheet?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  This is a spreadsheet of every single visitor that has visited me since November 2022.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  This is insane. And- Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. We really need to slow down here. You're scrolling through, there's so many tables and cells. How many people have visited you in total since November 2022?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  If you count people who weren't my guests, but I kind of contributed to their experience for, that's 119 people.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Oh my God, you have graphs.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Wait, sorry, how many?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  119 people have visited me.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Since November 2022.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  That's right. And if you count only my personal guests, that's 96 guests.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  If you average that out, that's actually one person every five days. That's 20% of my days since November 2022. That's been filled with someone visiting me from maybe the US or Europe.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Both the fact of the frequency is wild and the exactness of your documentation is wild.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  So it's a, it's a guest visit calendar, November 22 to April 26. And it's every single day of your life and whether someone was visiting you?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly right. And as you can see, the green cells are when I had a visitor and especially, I think, around 2023 and 2025, this was taking over my life, PJ. Like I was spending all of my free time either planning what I would do with people that are visiting or helping them figure out their itineraries for when they're in Japan, like answering questions. Like I love everyone that visited, don't get me wrong, but I felt like I was spending so much time as like a personal tour guide.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  This is the picture, just the visual image, because it's on this calendar that you've shared, the days without visitors are white and the days with visitors are green and just the sheer amount of green squares. It's a data visualization of an out-of-control problem.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Sorry, I'm just, I'm so surprised by what I'm seeing. Did you know, like, I understand that part of the reason American tourism to Japan has spiked is just like economic, but I feel like it is not just economic. Do you have an understanding as someone who has lived in both cultures, what happened to make Japan so cool to Americans?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is something I want to know too. I originally thought that maybe at first it started out with the K-pop hype and then kind of a more interested in general in the Asias, but I'm not sure that that accounts for such a huge spike in tourists in Japan. So if you have the answer to this, I would love to know.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Because it's funny, like countries kind of get crushes on each other sometimes. Like, like one country will just decide another country represents like sophistication or chicness or whatever. And like, I feel like I've been a part of and observed at the same time that wave happened from America to Japan, where all of a sudden it's like Japanese clothes and like Japanese food and Japanese pop culture is like what the people I know seem more curious about, what definitely teenagers here seem more curious about. And it's like you want somebody who can say, to the extent that question is even answerable, like here's what happened.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Okay, so this week, we take on Lisa's question, which I have to say appealed to me because it was a question I've had, people at our show have also had. Why, both in my real life and on social media, does it seem like so many people are going to Japan? It used to be rare. We had our theories at the show, but what we wanted were answers. This week, the real origin story of an international crush after this break.

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• 11:10Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the show.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Why are so many people going to Japan? This question, it turns out, belongs to my favorite genre, the kind of question you can ask at a dinner party and know that there's a good chance it'll redirect conversation for about 45 minutes. Because obviously, there's lots of reasons someone would visit Japan. But what happens is every person at the dinner becomes convinced that they are the one who has deduced the reason. And dinner turns, for me in a fun way, into Japanese tourism supply and demand court, with each person prosecuting a different case. It's a cheap currency. It's Pokemon. It was lost in translation. Guilty, guilty. Probably not guilty. But the thing is, talk is cheap. We wanted real answers here. And so we invented a patented method to try to suss them out,

• 11:58Speaker 00

  a two-part test. We decided that first we would talk to experts on Japan and America, find out what the experts thought was going on. But then we would check that expert work against our own listener survey to see if the reasons the experts said tourists were all going to Japan matched the reasons the tourists said they were going to Japan. Science-esque. So, let's begin.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Can you say your name and what you do?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yes, my name is Roland Nozoma-Keltz. I'm a Japanese-American author and editor and scholar, professor at Waseda University. And I'm producing a film right now.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  What's the film?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  It's a documentary about Osamu Tezuka, the god of manga and the father of anime.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  It sounds like you stay busy.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  I do.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Where am I currently speaking to you from? Where are you?

• 12:46Speaker 02

  I'm in Tokyo.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  And how long have you lived in Tokyo?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  26 years.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  And before that?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Osaka. And before Osaka, I lived in New York City for about 10 years.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  So you grew up in America but moved to Japan when you were pretty young?

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, not exactly. I went to kindergarten in Moriyoka, Japan, which is where my grandparents lived. And so I was here when I was five and a half. And then I used to come back to Japan every summer with my mother, who is Japanese.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Got it. Roland was an ideal person to talk to, both because he's written about the question we're asking and also because his roots in both countries have given him a kind of cultural double vision. He can see Japan from an American perspective, but also vice versa. Roland will tell you that the American pull towards Japan has happened for a variety of reasons, reasons we will explain in a helpful, numerical, and ordered list. The very first one, and for Roland the foremost, is one that, to me, at first sounded a little squishy. And then, as he explained it, persuasive. Reason number one: Japan's culture of storytelling.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  I often say that Japan is very poor in natural resources. There's no oil here, very little land. You know, you could grow rice, but only in these tiny rice paddies. It's a small country, but it's very rich in stories. The storytelling culture in Japan is astonishing. In fact, you know, most academics and critics would say that the first novel in world history is The Tale of Genji, which is Japanese. It's 1,000 years old, you know? Stories in Japan are really amazing. And I think through the internet and through manga and anime, the rest of the world discovered that the storytelling is astonishing.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Stories. This is the beginning part of Roland's thesis for what's going on here. And he told me, "Western fascination with Japanese storytelling transmitted via Japanese culture, that's not something that began, as I'd assumed, in the 90s." According to Roland, there have already been two prior waves of this.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  One was in the late 19th century, driven largely by Europeans. This movement called Japanism or Japanisma, particularly the French, but other parts of Europe, were drawn to Japanese woodblock prints, which, weirdly enough, were, they were kind of low culture, just like manga, where Japanese comics were low culture. These woodblock prints were disposable. They were printed en masse. And they were used often to wrap Japanese ceramics or other valuable goods when they were shipped to Europe. And these Europeans sort of like took off the wrapping paper. You know, it'd be like putting newspapers around delicate objects.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  And they discovered that, wow, this wrapping is just beautiful. Stunning. A big difference, though, is that it was mostly the upper classes and the aesthetes who were drawn to Japan at that time. So 1867, I think, was the World's Fair in Paris. And Japan had a booth or a platform. And they presented all these Japanese visual arts. And the Europeans were smitten. And so you had Van Gogh and Degas, Monet, taking influence from these Japanese prints. And so that was in the late 19th century. And then you had another wave, second wave, in the 50s and 60s, when the beatniks and the hippies

• 16:26Speaker 02

  were drawn to concepts, very loose concepts of Buddhism from Japan, this notion of letting things happen and not always being the agent of your own story, but accepting the universe as it is, nirvana. You know, concepts that were not exclusively Japanese, but were delivered through Japanese imagery and Japanese novels and poetry. So again, it was sort of high art, or at least a concept of high art that Westerners imagined was Japanese. So what's different now is that it's clearly pop culture that is driving this current wave.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  And I'm not really that philosophical about it. I think it's very specifically commercial. There was a huge hit series called Pokemon that emerged in the late 1990s, almost simultaneously with another hit manga and anime series called Dragon Ball.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  And those emerged in the late 90s, roughly the same time that Studio Ghibli, the studio of the great Hayao Miyazaki,

• 17:49Speaker 02

  they made a deal with Walt Disney Corporation for distribution of Miyazaki's films, including My Neighbor Totoro, which became kind of an iconic film for young Americans. And that explosion in the mid to late 1990s occurred at the time the internet was exploding. So the combination of the technology that could bring Japanese media into living rooms and bedrooms around the US and around the world, and these particular hit series and hit films brought the genius of Japanese storytelling and visual art

• 18:30Speaker 02

  into the bedrooms and living rooms of Americans. And that transformed Americans' image of Japan.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  It's funny, I mean, it's the way that sometimes, historically, America has charmed other places. It's like our pop culture, you know? It's like our movies show up.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Our dreams show up in another place. And then people become enamored with those dreams and they become curious about the people who have them.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  No, absolutely. The phrase "soft power" was coined by an American professor, Joseph Nye, from Harvard. He published an essay examining how the US was winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union, partly because the US had this great soft power. And what he meant by soft power was Hollywood movies, Levi's jeans, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, rock and roll, Elvis Presley, that made America look much more attractive than the Soviet Union. And of course, that phrase is applicable to Japan in the 21st century. It's a kind of power. Japan is so attractive.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  So Roland Kelts' explanation begins with the fact that the West has always had these periodic waves of interest in Japan. It's just that the most recent one, carried this time via pop culture, via TV and the internet, is the largest. So start with reason number one: soft power, the allure of Japanese culture and stories. But we know that soft power alone is not sufficiently explanatory, because Japanese culture has always been rich. But if you were alive before the year 1990, you will remember, Americans once had a very different view of Japanese culture. To talk about this part of the story, I need to pull away this drop cloth, under which I've been hiding this whole time, a second expert. Can you say your name and what you do?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Sure. I'm W. David Marks. I'm the author of three books, including Amatora: How Japan Saved American Style, and I live in Tokyo.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  How long have you lived in Tokyo?

• 20:32Speaker 03

  For more than two decades.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  David Marks, unlike our first expert, was not born into any kind of relationship with Japan. And the way he discovered one, it actually highlights how different our two countries used to be. So to explain, David grew up in Pensacola, Florida, a town which happens to be sister cities with a small mountain town in Japan called Gero, which meant when David was 17 in 1996, he got to do a brief summer exchange in Japan and promptly fell in love with the country, an experience, he points out, which was very rare for Americans at the time. Because the truth is, for the seven decades after World War II, America was not at all Japanophobic. In fact, until recently, the mainstream view here was pretty Japanophobic.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  So if you go back to the narrative of Japan in the United States in the 20th century, obviously, it was an enemy state until 1945, and then it was kind of seen as a developing country that was being rebuilt.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Not a great deal can be done to change the thinking of an adult nation. Their minds have been conditioned by years of militarism and emperor worship. So the future of Japan as a democracy lies in her children. It is here that the seeds of democracy must be firmly planted.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  And then by the 70s and 80s, you start getting the American anxiety towards Japanese economic prowess and business practices.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  That's what I remember growing up with. Like, I remember reading some Michael Crichton book after Jurassic Park that was like-

• 22:04Speaker 03

  Rising Sun.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  Just step aside. I have no trouble. This is police business. Seems like nobody's listening.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And they were the bad guys the way, like, today, I think the only bad guy book you could write like that would maybe be Russia. But it was like, they're scary bad guys, and we should be scared of them.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, so in the 80s, there starts to be anxiety about Japanese electronics and cars and the fact that they may surpass the United States in terms of being the number one economy in the world. And then by the late 80s and early 90s, that actually becomes that kind of Michael Crichton tension, where is Japan the next bad guy? There was a famous CIA position paper that came out after the Cold War ended, in which someone posited maybe Japan should be our next enemy. I mean, it didn't go that far. The US government didn't exactly adopt that. But there was a lot of anxiety about it. And I think in the 90s, there was almost some relief that the Japanese economy started to fail.

• 23:00Speaker 06

  Consumers not buying, an economy mired in recession, and politicians promising change to people short of cash. Sound familiar? Well, it's not the United States we're talking about this time. It's Japan.

• 23:12Speaker 07

  Japan has mostly itself to blame for the economic slump. The government's easy-money policies in the late 1980s fueled a boom in stock and land prices and speculative investment, the now infamous bubble economy.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  And so this worry about the Japanese economy went down, but it was kind of still seen as uncool, that Japan maybe has all this traditional culture and it has all these copies of Western culture, but it's not particularly that interesting. And even, you know, being here in, let's say, 2003, when I moved here, if a friend came to Japan, it would be this, like, huge event for the year.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, someone's come to Japan. Because it was just nobody came. I mean, it just wasn't a tourist spot at all.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Given we've heard about our listener, Lisa, with her full calendar and her 119 visitors, this all seems unimaginable now. But the numbers bear it out. If you go back to the early 2000s, the graph of foreign tourism to Japan is pretty much the exact opposite of today, meaning a country that experienced a teensy amount of tourists, a trickle. Three Japanese people took a trip out of the country for every foreigner who visited. And that's the Japan David Marks lived in for his first decade as a resident. He was a lonely American enthusiast in a country most people he knew would never want to come visit. In 2011, about a decade into David Marks's time in Japan, only 6 million foreign visitors came, which is what the US got this month alone. Whatever signal of

• 24:38Speaker 00

  coolness, of storytelling, of culture, Japan transmits to the rest of the world, something was blocking that signal, at least for almost everyone but David. And so you, I mean, this is such a funny way to put it, but like, you liked Japan before it was cool. I think one of the things I'm trying to track in this conversation with you is like, the rise of a country being considered cool by another country, which feels so subjective, although as you start to lay out these markers, like, you can actually look at American pop culture and see one country change its estimation of another.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the other part of this that is hard to understand if you're under the age of 40 is just the incredible amount of propaganda. I mean, it felt like propaganda, looking back, that you got from MTV about America is the coolest country in the world, and the reason the Soviet Union collapsed is because people wanted blue jeans and wanted to listen to Michael Jackson, and everybody wants to be American, and Americans effortlessly are the most stylish people on earth. And so, you know, especially when I went to Japan in 98 for the first time, everyone was dressed, you know, 100 times better than I'd ever seen in the United States. I mean, everyone. It's just, you walked down the streets, like,

• 25:54Speaker 03

  how is everyone dressed this well? And the consumer society just seems so much more robust. It just, the scale of it seems so big. And it really broke my brain, because I realized that the message I had gotten about how permanently cool the United States was and that cultural leadership wasn't quite true, that there was actually something going on in Japan, but no one had really seen it, because no one was over in Japan. So there was very little reporting of what was going on there.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  So David Marks started actually trying to rigorously study coolness, one of humanity's more elusive topics. He has now pursued questions like, why were Japanese youth in Harajuku, dressing so much more fashionably than American youth in Manhattan in the 1990s? And he's been able to arrive at, I believe, pretty convincing answers. He has also looked at the big question. Why was Japan uncool to Americans? And why did that change?

• 26:55Speaker 03

  In 2003, when I moved here, Japanese artists at that time were using the same materials as Western culture. And so they're designing t-shirts, which every American knew, and wearing sneakers in a cool way. And they are sampling old jazz records or doing things like hip hop, but slightly off. I mean, so I think they were operating in the same zone as American culture. As when you saw it, it did seem very strange, but it was speaking in those elements that you were expecting from American culture at the time.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  That's such a good description of something I've experienced but would not be able to articulate, is often it felt like, oh, these are people playing in our forms, or at least forms we like, with elements we like, but they're putting them together in a way that feels really different. And it's familiar and novel in a way that, like, draws me in. It's like oftentimes an experience I've had across that cultural transmission.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, even the name Donkey Kong.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  It's like, we vaguely understand that those are two words we know, but no American would put those together.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I mean, I used to feel like playing Mario. It felt like, just like, such a funny mix of like, a dream an American would have with elements that wouldn't have been in the dream.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  So imagine that across culture, and also imagine that this has been bubbling for decades in Japan and no one has seen it. And so in the 90s and early 2000s, it starts exploding into the US, because there's now a way to actually get access to it. And people are quite fascinated, I think for the right reasons. And then it just grows.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  So that's reason number two. Americans stopped being afraid of Japan and fell in love with the country because its culture was just different enough from ours to make us scratch our heads. But those reasons do not explain how this trend became supercharged. After this short break, the craziness begins.

• 29:19Speaker 00

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• 32:51Speaker 00

  I don't say this often, but for once, it was because of a government plan. A conspiracy, except not really, because this was in the open. The plan starts fitfully in Japan in 2003. Then-Prime Minister Junichiro Kozumi launches a campaign called Visit Japan. The goal is to get from 5 million yearly visitors to 10 million. The campaign launches with this advertisement which, if anyone outside of Japan had made it, I think would have been considered borderline problematic.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  This is their music, not ours. And if you're picturing a montage of geishas applying white makeup, cherry blossoms, temples, the world's most stereotypical procession of Japanese imagery as imagined by a Western eye, you are picturing things correctly. But this campaign fell short. Japan may have been an attractive place to visit, but it was too expensive. But then, in the early 2010s, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returns to office. And Abe does something very consequential. He deliberately drives down the value of the yen. He's doing this to help Japanese exports, not to bring in foreigners, but by pushing this button, he makes everything in Japan cheaper to outsiders: hotel rooms, restaurant meals.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  Here's Ron Kelz.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  You know, you can come to Tokyo, you can get a full, beautiful, excellent soba lunch meal for under $10. I'm not exaggerating, by the way. Under $10. I mean, last time I was in New York in May, you could kick an apple and a banana for $10.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, you really can.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  You know, so, I mean, it's become attractive partly because it's less expensive.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Japan has become less expensive, cheaper for foreigners. But remember, that was due to government intervention. And Abe, wanting to juice these numbers even more, now deploys more measures to further sweeten his country to outsiders. In 2013, he relaxes tourist visa requirements for visitors from Thailand and Malaysia. Soon after, he does the same for visitors from China and Indonesia, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, summons a ton of Asian tourists. Here's David Marks, who was living there at the time.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Asian tourists were the first major boom. So in the 2010s, people from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea start coming into Japan. And that really changes the city, and it makes it internationalize. And suddenly, there's English menus at every restaurant, which didn't exist before. And then you start getting more European and American tourists after that. I think, you know, a little bit pre-COVID and now after COVID, just exploding. And I do think there was just a word-of-mouth, almost campaign for Japanese tourism, which is that every person I met who would come here for the first time, they're like, "How was it?" They're like, "Oh, it was incredible."

• 36:02Speaker 03

  It was like a 99% satisfaction rate with their time in Japan. And so you could understand, they would go back home and tell everyone around them, "Oh, my God, Japan was incredible. You have to go." And then they would plot their return to Japan as well. And so it's kind of spreading word-of-mouth.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  David Marks has now had a front-row seat to the remarkable effect of all this word-of-mouth. Back in 2003, the year he arrived, Japan had had about 5 million annual foreign visitors. 20 years later, 2023, the first full year that our listener Lisa charted, 5 million visitors. Just two years later, that number had already nearly doubled, 42 million. The momentum has just become recirc. So much so that plenty of Japanese people now believe Operation Visit Japan has over-succeeded. We foreigners just love Japan too much. And of course, we foreigners cannot stop posting about our ardor.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  So you want to get to Tokyo for the low, or you came to the right place? This is how you get flights to Japan for cheap as [bleep].

• 37:10Speaker 02

  I flew to Japan from L.A. for only $500 round trip. Today, I'll be flying with Zip Air, which is a budget airline. You can literally get $2,000 tickets for just 800 bucks. Just take Google flights.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  This whole story of the third wave also tracks with the rise of Instagram and TikTok in the mid and late 2010s. You can call social media reason number four, which I'm only not going into more detail on because we all get it, and it's not that interesting. But I will say, to post a photo of a place online at all, the place first has to make you feel something, which leads us to reason number five, actually, the hardest thing to describe about Japan on a podcast and I think the easiest thing to notice as a visitor: the feeling you get as an outsider when you just experience how functional it is.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Like, toilets in Japan are so damn clean. Like, how is this even possible?

• 37:57Speaker 08

  The infrastructure is amazing. If you have a car, and you don't really need one, but if you have a car, the roads are amazing, you don't have to worry about potholes.

• 38:04Speaker 09

  The public transportation will literally take you anywhere that you need to go. And then what's crazy, bro, is everything is on time.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  A lot of different factors, I think, have contributed to the tourism attraction. But the most important one is functionality.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  What do you mean?

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of countries around the world, particularly the US, have become dysfunctional. And I say that in terms of public space. The parks are dirty and dangerous. The railway system is atrocious. The airports are a mess. And when you're in Japan, things just work.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  I'm jumping in here just to say that what Roland just said is, in my experience, both extremely true and also the kind of thing that I can imagine bothering some people who are listening, because I think to American ears, hearing somebody complain about public disorder, a dirty subway, a crowded city pool, can just sound very elitist. It's rich people shit. If you don't like it here, move to the suburbs, join a country club. But what's funny is that in Japan, the idea that you would want the subway to be clean isn't elitist. It's actually sort of the opposite. Why shouldn't public things be nice? Why should anyone want to opt out for a private option, pay for an Uber? Once you get used to this flip in thinking, you get to have a very surreal experience.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Walking around Tokyo, you just don't see trash on the street, not even cigarette butts. You don't smell urine or feces, animal or human. Public spaces in Japan are kept about as clean as private ones. For an American, visiting this is just such a new experience. I don't think it's why anyone visits the first time, but I bet it's why some people go back. It's part of why I wanted to. In America, one way you can show you care about society is to ride the dirty subway. In Japan, one way you can show you care about society is to be really invested in the subway being clean.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Japan is a democratic, pluralistic society that also has these socialist underpinnings. You should have clean, safe parks. Of course you get an education. Of course you have healthcare. It's not like, people have debated. It's a kind of civility that I think is very, very attractive in 2026.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  That was the thing I found most shocking the first time I visited was the level of function felt. It's funny, it didn't make me think, why isn't America like this? It made me think, how is it possible that Japan is like this? But just like to be on a public train that is more clean than my bedroom. And so I, what you're saying at least fits my own experience of rising Japanophilia. It was just like, whoa, this just seems to work and it's nice to briefly visit a place that seems to work.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Well, there are codes of behavior in Japan, and they don't suit everybody. I mean, you get on a railway carriage, a train car, and you just keep your voice down or you don't speak.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  You get on an elevator, crowded elevator, and you're with a friend of yours or your partner, and when you get on the elevator, you shut up.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  They're kind of bottom-up codes, which is very attractive to me because I don't like top-down authority. So I like the fact that when you're in Japan, you learn how to behave and you do it on your own. You know, there's no cop hovering over you telling you to do this or do that. You just notice that everybody else is doing this, so you're gonna do it. And it's not for everyone. I mean, just literally yesterday, I was in a cafe with a Russian woman who has lived in Japan for a number of years. She's totally fluent in Japanese. And she was explaining her project to me at this cafe, and the place

• 42:09Speaker 02

  was packed. And she has a very loud voice. And this guy who was two tables away from us stood up and in English, even though we were speaking Japanese, in English, he said, "Will you please keep your voice lower?" And because she's lived here, she looked at him and said, "Ah, sumimasen," which is, you know, "I'm sorry," or "excuse me." And she followed his request and lowered her voice. And we actually moved to another table to be away from him, so we wouldn't bother. He was trying to read. But what was interesting to me is I thought, you know, if this happened in New York,

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  I could imagine her saying to him, "You shut the F up and sit down and don't bother me."

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Which would be following the rules of this place.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I would totally respect her if she said that. And if the guy insisted, then I might even stand up and say, "Hey, sit down or go to another cafe."

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Fine, she has a loud voice, which is a problem. But in Japan, she heard him, she looked him straight in the eye, and she said, "Sumimasen, I'm sorry." But it did occur to me, like, this would be completely different in New York. It'd be confrontational. So there's also in Japan, this desire to avoid conflict and to harmonize somehow. And that can have its dark sides. I mean, some of the most vicious fights I've seen in bars have been in Japan, because when the pressure cooker explodes,

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. Like, you know, and I'm not the only one to say this. I've had a long friendship with Haruki Murakami, the novelist. And Haruki once said to me, you know, "I love the Japanese people, but they scare me." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because if someone told them to go to war tomorrow, they'd do it."

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Because of this desire for like consensus and harmony?

• 44:12Speaker 02

  I think that's what he meant, yeah. And I also think he was referring to a kind of repressed violence.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Hmm. And it's something that like, I guess you would see more as a person who lives in the culture than a person who visits it. Because of what you're describing is a status quo mainly of harmony and order with occasional, like, the suppression of aggression coming out in a much more amplified way. That's just not something that you see on your five-day trip to like Tokyo and Osaka.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Not usually. I mean, unless you're unlucky and in the wrong bar at the wrong time, you could see it.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Different cultures have different values. And the things an American tourist is likely to appreciate in Japan, more order, maybe more harmony. A Japanese person might say, "Yes, those things are true." And there's another side to them. There's nuance, certainly, to all of this. Even the idea, which you'll hear a lot, that Japan is safer than America. It's true on the level of crime statistics, but I'm sure we have Japanese listeners who have had experiences that don't map to those numbers. Every place is complicated. Okay. Have we made it across the slightly delicate road bridge of observing cultural differences? Maybe. If we have, I would like to take us to the sixth and final reason that our experts offered as to why foreign visitors are visiting Japan. The final element

• 45:34Speaker 00

  in our perfect storm. It's actually Japanese craft.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  There's a term shokunin in Japanese, which is basically a crafts person, somebody who makes something really, really well, or who is a great, great chef. They know how to make great sushi, they know how to make great ramen. And it's revered here, still, even in 2026. And I think it does date back to the Edo era from the 17th century, this hierarchy in Japan where people who make things and can actually execute and do something are superior to merchants

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  who just sell stuff. A really great guy in the anime industry once said to me that Japanese people, if they're going to do business overseas, they need to understand the Walmart model. And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, in America, the merchant, the company that delivers or sells the good is number one. Nobody cares who actually made the goods."

• 46:42Speaker 00

  No.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  He said, "So if you go into Walmart, you can buy a $5 pillow, and it was made by people who know nothing about pillows. They don't care about pillows. They're working in some factory in Southeast Asia or China." And he said, "That's the Walmart model." But he said, "In Japan, we actually think the person who made the pillow and made it really well is the most valuable person." And I often discover, you know, when I have American friends come and they, they say, "I want to go to the best ramen place in your neighborhood." And so, you know, they can look it up on Google now. But we go to the ramen place and there's a line around the block and you have to purchase a ticket.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  And the ticket says, "You can come back at 3:00 PM and get a seat at our little ramen counter." I take them back at 3:00 PM and we have this ramen. And they say to me, "Oh my god, that's the best ramen I've ever had in my life. It's the best soup I've ever had in my life. It's incredible." And sometimes, if they're business people, they say, "Why don't they franchise?" And I've interviewed enough chefs and shop owners to tell them that they don't franchise, because if they franchise, they're not going to be in control of the noodles, how the noodles are cooked. They're not going to be able to control the negi, the spring onions, where they get them, where they source them. You know, they source

• 48:06Speaker 02

  their spring onions from a guy named Sato, who is in Chiba, and he has the best spring onions. And they source them from this guy, and they've done it for years. And they're not going to be able to control that if they franchise and open a shop in Yokohama. They're not going to be able to control the quality of the pork broth, the quality of the bamboo shoots. All of this is done internally, and it's very, very site-specific. If they franchise, they can't control that. But the American idea is, "Oh, of course you'd franchise because you can make more money," right? You can just grow, grow, grow, grow. Japan is not like that. It's not about grow, grow, grow. It's about, no, no, no, you're the crafts person, you're the person who makes it, you make the pillow really, really well.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter who Walmart is. They're idiots. They're very low on the hierarchy. The top of the hierarchy is the guy or the girl who knows how to make an excellent pillow.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's like, you know, people care about money to some degree, to different degrees, everywhere. But

• 49:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  what people tend to care about the most, or a lot at least, is status. And so, if you have a place that worships the biggest merchant, you're going to have a lot of Walmart. And if you have a place that gives more status to the best craftsmen, then you're going to have more wonderful, small places that do something really, really well.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I think that is a part of the tourist attraction to Japan.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  So those are the answers, per our experts and their research. But we don't just blindly follow experts here. I'm not vaccinated. Kidding, kidding. However, we did put out a call to the hundreds of thousands of listeners in Search Engine Nation and ask to hear from people who have visited Japan, wanting to check our work here. And once we asked, we unsurprisingly got an inbox-melting number of replies, which looked like a lot to sort through. But fortunately, Piper Dumont, Search Engine's chief data scientist and also intern, collated the responses. It turns out that our listeners' reasons for visiting map insanely well onto what we've just learned. For instance, nearly half of our respondents mentioned culture.

• 50:24Speaker 10

  I had always been obsessed with Japanese pop culture. I grew up binge-watching a lot of anime.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  I've always been into anime and video games. You know, Nintendo consoles, Sony consoles, being a fan of Pokemon, One Piece and all that. One listener sounded like he was quoting our expert, David Marx, verbatim.

• 50:44Speaker 11

  It is both simultaneously extremely similar to and also dissimilar from any Western country that you've been to, which makes it a very unique experience.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  About a quarter mentioned the weak currency.

• 50:55Speaker 12

  The currency exchange rate seemed like it was the best in like 30 years. I remember reading an article about that.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  The Australian dollar has a very favorable exchange rate with the yen. We also heard a lot of people talk about craftsmanship. But what delighted me the most were the reasons that just would never have been captured by any method other than a large survey.

• 51:15Speaker 13

  I got FOMO seeing so many people go, and I went to see the Godzilla museum.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Godzilla brought five listeners to Japan. I hope they got to meet him. And there were also the one-of-one responses.

• 51:27Speaker 13

  I went to Japan last year to see the work of Masehiko Kimura. He is a legendary bonsai master who has what I would call a very unique punk rock chainsaw approach to his trees.

• 51:40Speaker 14

  I fell in love when I was 18, but I didn't realize it until over 10 years later, long after we'd lost contact. I recognized that the only way I'd ever see him again was to fly to Japan, which eventually led me to spend a magical four days in Osaka last year.

• 51:56Speaker 12

  I'm six foot five and have blonde hair. And Japanese people would say, oh, my God, you should go to Japan. People will stop you on the street and ask for your autograph. By the way, it was not true.

• 52:08Speaker 15

  There's a lot of different reasons that people do it. But I was there to honor the dead, specifically my mother, who had passed the year prior.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  People go to places because of other people or their memories of them. Also, maybe this shouldn't have surprised me, but I didn't expect to hear how enthusiastic some listeners sounded just talking about what Japan's functionality meant to them. Like, it was a place you could go where entropy had been paused.

• 52:36Speaker 16

  I took my family to Japan so they could see what a high-functioning society really looks like, where everything runs on time, is perfectly clean.

• 52:45Speaker 17

  It's clean, which is especially important for an age where kids like to pick things up off the ground and lick them.

• 52:51Speaker 18

  There are public toilets everywhere featuring functioning binhays, for instance, because everybody poops and poopy butts are gross.

• 52:57Speaker 17

  Everything just works. It's on time.

• 53:00Speaker 19

  If every country treated each other with the respect, like the Japanese, and their punctuality and how they queue, oh, the world would be a far better place.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  It's funny, because like, you know, as broken as a place can be, I still really love America, and I love a lot of what is so annoying about it. Like, I love the sort of anarchic mix of different people with different values, expressing themselves in different ways. And, you know, the general feeling that, you know, something kind of broke 10 years ago, not just politically, but like COVID, like everyone, the driving got angrier, the people got angrier, the elbows got harder, the people listening to like TikTok videos without headphones on the subways seemed to be more prevalent. It's like, I both love the way people live here, and it's like an eccentric friend you know who is starting to turn the corner

• 54:06Speaker 00

  from eccentric to not well. Like, it makes me understand the draw of Japan. And also that what you're saying is both it is a distinct culture that insists on its own values, on its own way of being, and also it's a place whose public presentation is now about modeling or emphasizing things that are true about itself that people come to visit to encounter.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's a good summation. And also, I should add that a lot of what you said about what makes America or the United States so attractive is equally attractive to a lot of my Japanese friends. I mean, a lot of my Japanese friends are really, really attracted to the US. They love American movies. They love American TV. They love American pop music. They are very excited when they have a chance to go to LA or Seattle or New York or Boston.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Because it's a place that is like, for the same reason Americans are excited about Japanese culture, because it's just a place that is different?

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, different, but also, you know, it's so free. There are no codes of behavior. If you're Japanese, you don't have to behave like a Japanese if you're in, you know, in midtown. You don't have to. It's all lifted off of you. I have a Japanese friend who's a very successful editor at Conde Nast Japan, and she has lived in Vancouver, and she's lived in New York. And she actually said to me once, she said, oh, she said, when I'm on the plane and it's landing in Tokyo, I get this in English, you'd say, my, my shoulder sees up. And I said, what do you mean? She was like, oh, she's like, I'm coming back to Japan. I have to, I have to follow the rules.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  And so it's also important to note that Orientalism has its sort of inverse, right? You know, there's a lot of Japanese who think America is fantastic because there's no rules. There's no codes. If somebody tells you to be quiet at a cafe, you can say, fuck off.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Right? And it's fine. You can't do that here.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like two places you can go to have a vacation, not just from your place, but your culture.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  Roland Kelts, professor at Wasada University. We'll have links to his excellent book, Japan: America, in our show notes. We will also have a link to W. David Marx's book, Amatora, there as well. I recommend both. Also, thanks to all of our wonderful listeners for sending us your voice messages. I'm sorry we couldn't play them all. We did listen to them all, and we're going to do more of this in the future.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It's created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trithi Pemene. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Fact-checking this week by Annika Robbins. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tancati, and Hillary Scheff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please email us, [email protected], subject line, advertising. You can also send us your questions there, if you have a question for the show.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  If you are a Search Engine listener who would like to never again hear an ad on our show, then you can sign up for Incognito Mode. It's our paid feed. We also provide bonus episodes. Just recorded one today. You can find Incognito Mode at searchengine.show. Your contributions there, which are voluntary, are also what help us keep our project running. We really appreciate our Incognito Mode listeners. We also appreciate all of our listeners. Thank you for listening to our show. We'll see you next week.

• 58:59Speaker 00

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